After working very hard for perhaps several weeks, your a course in miracles books is now ready. You want to sell it online to the world. In the sales letter, you need to put the price for your e-Book. The question is: how do you decide what is the price to be set for your e-Book?
An e-Book is generally priced lower than a printed hard copy of the same text. For instance a paperback version of a book may be priced at US$15 while its e-Book version will be priced significantly lower, may be at US$8 or US$10. This is largely due to the huge savings entailed in the production and delivery logistics of an e-Book.
You can set the price of your e-Book in your own local currency, plus the equivalent in US Dollar.
So as a first timer, how do you go about deciding what price to charge for your great effort? A large part of e-Book pricing is sheer trial and error but there are a few pointers to set you off in the right direction. A good method to follow is charging an average of the range of prices charged for similar e-Books in the marketplace.
You can do research on sites like Amazon.com and Google search to see how other e-Books on similar topics are priced. Also try and analyze the sales patterns to see which price point tends to sell more than the others. Based on your comparative findings, you may position your e-Book at a middle price point in the market without charging either too high or too low.
Indeed the pricing can often make or break the sales of an e-Book. When you charge too low you come across as selling a sub-par product and by over-charging you run the risk of having to reduce prices at a later stage if your e-Book does not sell, thereby alienating those who bought it at full price. In light of this, often the comparative method described above falls short of the precision required to be successful in this business. If you would like to take a more scientific approach to product pricing, you can use one of the following two pricing strategies depending on what your immediate goals for your e-Book are.
(i) Pricing to Penetrate
As the name suggests, this pricing strategy is aimed at penetrating the market of your topic’s niche and gaining a wide readership. As such the pricing needs to be pocket friendly and enticing enough for a new buyer to try your product out. But you must take care not to price yourself too cheap or your e-Book will come across as a poor quality offering. Volumes are the name of the game with this strategy and hence it must be supplemented with widespread availability across multiple distribution channels.
Interestingly, many first time e-Book authors preferred this pricing policy to acquire a large base of loyal customers who are usually willing to pay higher prices from the second e-Book onwards. Reassuringly, as much as 80% of e-Book buyers tend to buy subsequent offerings from the same author thereby validating this pricing strategy.
(ii) Pricing at a Premium
This is the opposite of the penetrative pricing strategy. It seeks to charge a premium price from a fewer number of buyers who are willing to pay for your product. This strategy works well for established experts and domain leaders who are famous for what they are preaching. It also works for e-Books that divulge new ways of doing things that were hitherto unknown, that is, it works for innovative breakthrough content.
Even when pricing at a premium, authors eventually reduce prices after a pre-decided time frame to increase volumes but never drop rates to penetrative pricing levels.
